


the way the heavens go

by sorrymom



Series: space [1]
Category: TWICE (Band)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:42:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24628741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorrymom/pseuds/sorrymom
Summary: Mina is on Mars.Nayeon isn't.
Relationships: Im Nayeon/Myoui Mina
Series: space [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926064
Comments: 27
Kudos: 269





	the way the heavens go

**Author's Note:**

> happy early birthday kai:-) sorry i couldn't wait

Sunsets on Mars are blue. 

_I wish I could send you a picture_ , reads the transmission from Mina. 

There have been a lot of wishes lately. 

_I can imagine it_ , Nayeon sends back, her fingers frantic over the keyboard. 

It takes thirteen minutes for a message like this to split through the nearly ninety million silent, breathless miles between them and spell itself out on Mina’s parallel screen. 

And then whatever she replies with takes another thirteen minutes to arrive in Nayeon’s apartment in Seoul. 

The pace of Nayeon’s life is now measured in 26 minute intervals. 

Above her headboard, Nayeon keeps a line of butter-yellow Post-It notes, cataloguing all the numbers that are important. 

The smallest number is five. 

Five years that Mina will be on Mars. 

But when it’s late at night, when the transmission machine begins to whir in the corner of her dark room, when she realizes she’s rolled onto Mina’s side of the bed again only to find there isn’t a hint of jasmine perfume against the pillowcase— 

Five years is fifty-two weeks. 

Fifty-two weeks is 1,825 days. 

Which is 43,800 hours. 

Which is infinite and unsteady here on the mattress that feels like a lifeboat on the Pacific, rising and falling over each skyscraper wave, the stars beaming down to make a mirror on the sea.

 _We know less about the ocean than we do about space_ , Mina had typed out once. Nayeon supposes it was meant to be comforting, a little anchor of reference, a little cliche fun fact that’s supposed to make mystery familiar enough to bear. 

_But the ocean is here._

There is only enough time in an Earth day to receive 55 messages from Mina. 

There are not always 55 things to say. 

“How do you feel about distance,” Mina asks. 

It’s their third date. They cooked together in the narrow alley kitchen of Mina’s apartment, elbows bumping, mumbling the apologies of people who don’t yet know that they are burning to touch each other. 

Nayeon slits her thumb with a paring knife and squeals for fun until Mina brings it to her mouth and kisses over the blood. 

“Japan isn’t far.” 

“What about the moon?” Mina is as pale as a candlestick, shaking like a flame. “What about further?” 

The government deposits Mina’s paycheck into Nayeon’s bank account. It’s another unreal number in her life, a number that means ‘you could do anything.’ 

Jihyo has said it before, whistling through her teeth when Nayeon covers her face in her hands and admits Mina’s salary, half-drunk and half-ashamed. 

“That’s not why you married her, right?” Jihyo’s smile is teasing. Soju shines on her lips. 

“I wish it was.” Nayeon feels warmer than she has in months, blushing up her cheeks and down her chest. 

“You could do anything,” Jihyo continues. When she drinks, she gets so serious it’s silly. “You could move to another country, you could— no, you could buy an island.” 

“It’s Mina’s money,” Nayeon says to remind them both. 

But Jihyo is now talking about the Galapagos, the finches and tortoises there, and how nice it must be to watch an egg yolk yellow sunset over the sea. 

Nayeon and Mina were married on a beach. 

It was a crescent cut of sand off the Big Island. They were wearing flip flops. Their two witnesses were tourists from the hotel tiki bar, draining pina coladas while Nayeon and Mina whispered promises to each other over the applause of the whitecaps. 

_I’ll love you faster than light._

_I’ll love you louder than anything._

_Have you thought about seeing other people?_

Nayeon wakes up to this transmission. There’s a sinkhole in her stomach. She jots down on Post-It after Post-It the right thing to say. The right way to spell out ‘no’ so that it reads as a scream. 

Instead, she sends, _have you?_

For twenty six minutes, Nayeon paces. Her mind fractures off again and again— did something happen? Is something about to? Is it Jeongyeon? Is it Sana? 

And, if it was, would it be that bad? 

In a place with less gravity, it must feel good to touch people. To feel their weight over your chest as you fall asleep. To have that hand on yours in a rust red world. 

Mina deserves to be held. 

_No_ , comes the transmission from Mars. _But I am lonely._

 _I’m lonely too_ , Nayeon types out. 

_Mathematically, being lonely together doesn’t add up to much._

Nayeon paints their bedroom robin’s egg blue. 

_I miss the angle of your jaw. I miss your eyes like wings. When I see you I’ll kiss your hands and your mouth and your ears. Last night I dreamed you came here and you stayed._

Mars’ tallest mountain is three times higher than Mount Everest. 

“Sometimes I feel like I love a ghost,” Nayeon says. She’s sitting on the porch of Jihyo’s cabin, watching a rote, Earthly sunset over the Yeongnam Alps. 

“Did you know,” Jihyo says, in that voice that means she knows Nayeon doesn’t, “that Galileo made maps of Hell?” 

Nayeon takes another swig of the cheap pilsner they picked up at the convenience store. 

“He thought the entrance was the river Acheron.” 

There are no rivers on Mars, though there used to be.

“Did he make maps of Heaven?” 

Jihyo smacks her lips. “No.” 

_I’m going to be on the news. Channel four, sometime in the morning. It was pre-recorded._

It’s the first time Nayeon has seen Mina in six months. She’s thinner, cheeks less full. Her hair is short and ink-black. 

_Who cut it_ , Nayeon types out before she can stop herself. She can guess, by the way the astronaut beside her— Sana— passes a hand through her wife’s hair while the other, Jeongyeon, starts answering the questions written on the script in her hands. 

It’s mostly jargon, barely watered down for the likely audience of housewives sitting on their couches, waiting on the weather report. 

Just over Mina’s shoulder is a small, round window like one on a submarine. It’s the only detail that makes it seem like she’s anywhere but Earth— a mountain range as red as poppies. 

But not poppies, Nayeon reminds herself. 

She feels like crying but holds the sobs in her mouth to taste them. 

Mina, pixelated, smiles placidly at the camera. 

“What’s the point?” Nayeon doesn’t mean for it to sound so rough, so accusatory, but it does. They’re laying in bed, shirts mostly unbuttoned, long hair tangled and Nayeon doesn’t know where exactly she stops being herself and becomes Mina. Nayeon doesn’t know if it’s important to have the coordinates. 

Mina will leave for Mars in a month. 

Mina props herself up on her elbows, suddenly stiff. “You think I would leave you for something pointless?” 

That Mina can so easily, so steadily, say ‘leaving you’— not even pretend it’s something else— makes it hard to listen to the actual explanation. About how Mars is a tomb of the future. About how maybe they’ll learn something to save this rotting earth, or at least, learn exactly how the rot will happen. 

“So it’s not to find some pretty aliens,” Nayeon tries. She wants Mina to laugh. She wants to hear Mina laugh more before she goes. 

“No.” Mina’s fingers dash up her shirt, fixing the buttons. Nayeon can’t help but feel like she’s undoing something, sealing a cut that Nayeon always wanted to remain open and weeping. “I think we’re alone in this universe.” 

“But it’s so big,” Nayeon protests, voice thinning in pitch. “You don’t— there’s so much we don’t know. That’s what you’re always telling me.” 

It would make this easier— hypothetically, intellectually easier— if Mina had a beautiful reason. If Mina pretended there was something noble or martyrish in offering herself to the dog-mouth maw of the sky. 

“It’s just that being alone is the simplest, saddest option,” Mina says with her sad eyes, rolling off the bed. “What’s true is usually simple and sad.”

She’ll shower now, and Nayeon will hug a pillow for practice as she listens to the water fall against the tiles. 

_I never meant to cause you pain._

It takes Mars approximately two times as long as Earth to orbit the sun. 

A day on Mars is an hour longer than a day on Earth. 

It’s not the worst planet for Nayeon’s wife to be on. There’s the sulfur poison of Venus, the anonymously blank thumbprint of Mercury, or the distant gas giants that are one circuit-breaker away from becoming a star. 

In June, Mars can be seen at dawn. 

Not in Seoul, where the skyscrapers act like the lens of a lighthouse, funneling every flash up into a big hazy flower over the city. 

Nayeon drives out to Jihyo’s cabin after work. They wake ungodly early, stumbling around in their slippers, spilling slips of coffee on their hands. Jihyo bought a telescope just a week after Mina left, and they take turns peering up at the planet that lays as still as an orange moth on a cast iron temple bell. 

“I wish I could just pull that out of the sky,” Nayeon sighs. She reaches up and pinches the air. There is nothing in her hand. 

“Why did you marry her?” 

“She asked me to.” 

Jihyo clicks her tongue, unimpressed. “Unnie, that’s not the kind of person you are.” 

“Don’t you think people are different when they’re in love?” 

When Nayeon gets home, she jogs to the transmission machine. 

_Don’t you think that people change, like water, to fit someone else’s heart?_

Twenty-six minutes later, Mina says, _yes._

Almost all water on Mars exists as ice. 

_Can you reach true love?_

_Let’s say yes._

Sometimes she thinks Mina won’t come back. 

Not in the worst, tragic way, but in the way that parts of the universe can be so devastatingly hot and so horrifically cold but, in the end, even out to a perfect sameness. Sameness persists. Entropy keeps rolling down a hill. 

Sometimes Nayeon thinks she will always be waiting, suspended forever in her bedroom, hands aching as she waits to type another _I miss you._

How many _I miss you_ ’s until it’s just _I’ll always miss you?_

If Mina comes back she’ll come back different. 

Astronauts, upon return to Earth, experience certain cognitive declines. They’re also skinnier, their genes mutate, their vision gets worse. 

What’s impossible to know is how Nayeon has changed in the five years. It won’t be something you can put under a microscope. 

_You’ll look cute with glasses_ , she sends before she turns off the lights. It’s hard to know if she’s sleeping or if it’s just dark. 

_I’ll be home for Christmas_ , Mina sends the day before she leaves. Before she comes back. Nayeon isn’t sure how she thinks of it, or if that distinction matters. 

It takes 303 days to get from Mars to Earth. 

43 weeks. 

Less than a year. 

It’s not exactly a zero, but it’s close enough. 

Nayeon dances alone through her apartment and all the pop songs make sense. 

For a second, there is no gravity hitching her to the floor, to the bed, to Seoul or anywhere. 

“The interesting thing about the Galapagos finches,” Jihyo is saying, laid back against Nayeon’s couch, “is that even in such a small place, they needed to change so much.” 

“Mhmm.” Nayeon has been looking at the transmission machine for the last hour. It has a little green pin light that blinks when something is coming across space, straight to her bedroom.

“If you think about it, humans have made it too easy for ourselves. We’ll never adapt. We’re always going to be the same, and we’ve been the same for so long.” Jihyo sighs heavy, like she always does when she has these big thoughts. “The only thing we have left as a species is to learn a little more.” 

It’s probably what Mina always wished for Nayeon to understand, but never had the words for. 

“Thank you,” she whispers before she kisses Jihyo’s forehead. 

She does look at her friend’s lips. Just for a second, as they reshape into a smile. “What do you think it’ll be like, that first second when you see her again?” 

_I want to go back to Hawaii_ , Mina sends. She’s somewhere between the moon and everywhere else. 

These days, it takes less and less time for the transmissions to meet Mina in space and Nayeon on Earth. 

_I don’t remember what your voice sounds like._

Nayeon thinks again of the sunset on Mars, in all its shades of indigo. Like the bouquets they held on the beach, even though they wanted to hold each other’s hands. 

In 1968, the first picture is taken of Earth. 

The Earth is over four billion years old at the time. 

Some people see the picture and despair. They aren’t ready to know how small they are, held in the dark jaws of constant midnight. They aren’t ready to know that their place isn’t a collection of continents and oceans, but a bluish pupil suspended on nothing. 

Some people see the picture and a tear slips down their cheek. It’s harder to explain what they feel, what they find beautiful, until Nayeon is in the hangar.

Twenty minutes is sometimes longer than five years, but waiting doesn’t make her ready for the door on the airplane to open. 

“I think I’ll faint,” she murmurs to the woman beside her, who is already beaming. “Or puke, oh God, what if—”

Jeongyeon is first. 

Then Sana. 

For a second, the universe shrinks to the corners of a door frame. It’s empty and black. 

And then Mina dawns. 

Nayeon understands her smallness, her happy insignificance, numbers that were unimaginable. She understands the people who believe in God and those who don’t, and she is as in love as she had been when Mina kissed her bloody hand in her kitchen. It’s a feeling stretched wide that never gets thin, that can’t be broken down to equations or diagrams or the flickering of a radio signal across empty space. 

“Do you miss it?” 

The Earth’s sunset is honey on Mina’s face, reflected out by the satellite lenses of her round glasses. Nayeon can’t stop looking at her. She never wants to sleep again. 

“The blue,” Mina asks. 

In the last month, Nayeon has relearned all the lilts of her voice, the micromovements of her lips as she speaks, the articulation of her hands when they reach for Nayeon’s. 

“Mhmm.” 

“It never felt right.” Mina slides her hand into the cool sand. “This is the one we were meant for.”

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter.....](https://twitter.com/sawah2129)


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